Review by Allan Becker

One of the best kept secrets of gardening is the spiritual transformation that one experiences each time one enters a garden to tend, to admire or to escape. For that reason, a chakra garden is not an altogether new concept to the passionate gardener. It may also help others understand the spirituality that some gardeners have reported experiencing. A chakra garden is a botanical environment that provides a place of rest and healing.

The author believes that nature provides healing energies that can benefit us when we choose to sit in a garden. This view is reinforced by healing gardens that have recently been built at some hospitals throughout the United States as part of a program for convalescence or palliative care. Visitors to chakra or healing gardens are positively influenced by the perfumes of plants, colors, textures and petal shapes, birds and their songs as well as insects and their sounds. One is immediately affected by the beauty and peace experienced there. The author suggests that when one heals the soul, the healing of the body will follow.

This book is a journey to the seven chakra gardens that the author has built in the Andes over the last twelve years. Each garden addresses a different aspect of human nature and is inspired by the ancient yoga philosophy which connects the seven energy centers to one’s soul. In each garden one can find physical symbols, flowers, herbs, and stones that are meaningful and that relate to specific chakras. It is the author’s hope that we will be inspired to create chakra gardens for ourselves. Those of us that become more serene simply by entering our own gardens will understand how easily attainable that goal can be.

The editors of this book have wisely decided to take Greg Asbury’s superb photographs and blow them up to larger than life. In doing so, they have accomplished two objectives. Firstly, the enlarged pictures create the illusion that the reader has been almost reduced to the size of an insect. Ever wonder how a flower hypnotizes a flying insect to drink its nectar and pollinate it in the process? Just look at the magnified photos and you will wonder no more. Seeing a flower from the perspective of an insect is a visual experience not to be missed. Secondly, the enlarged beauty of the flower is both magnificent and overwhelming. Focus for a moment on any one of these brilliant pictures and you might be transported to a place you never thought imaginable. Reading this book is in itself a chakra garden experience.

This book won the Independent Publisher Book Award for Best New Age/Mind Body Spirit Book for 2009.

Chakra Gardens (Mitra Pub Group/ 2008) by Carol Cumes, Photography by Greg Asbury

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